MAL Ep. 16
In today's adventure, the party did not find the missing Seven Quinn, but they did find a lot of other peculiar goings-on. 1) First, Lady Aldrayeth came over at five in the morning to speak with Jarth. Apparently his guildmaster, Estobb, had told Aldrayeth Jarth was going to Ruastin to look for Seven (which the party had told him last session.) She loaned Jarth a cube of force to help him recover Seven. She made a couple of references to using her weight to threaten or intimidate Seven's abductor, but said it would not be possible if she doesn't know who that is.The party decided to inform her about Threndix' attack, which surprised her-- when they said he was after an extraplanar friend who was a Dullahan, she wanted to know if she was perhaps "part fey," and when Khirg said she was not, she said "Then it must be a different prophecy than the one I'm-- well, I don't have an answer for you. travelers, as you can see. I will have to look into this." Exit Lady Aldrayeth. 2) The party went to speak with Detective Noyar and shared everything they knew about Seven's abduction with him. Noyar asked what Seven "had her nose into" prior to being kidnapped, and took careful note of your answers. He seems to think it's more likely that Seven's investigations led her to cross the League of Snakes herself than that the kidnappers were using her to get at you guys, but does not write off the latter possibility. Exit Noyar. 3) The party went to Ruastin at a forced march. Overnighting at an inn, they were surprised by a drow agent who used some magical netting to immobilize Aler, Bay and Angara and give Bay some kind of magical injection. Bay caused a chandelier to fall in the lobby outside their room as a distress call, causing Red and Adriel to enter the room and eventually release the paralyzed characters. Borrowing Bay's ring of running, Aler and Red ran down the escaping drow despite his signifcant head start and the magical darkness he had invoked, at which point he readily surrendered and returned to the inn with you. 4) The drow agent gave his name as Enzin Ken'rae, and claimed he had been sent on a mission by his house with the orders to "tag the target with an invocation, and not to kill her." He professed not to know what the invocation itself was, only that it was an invocation of the Spider Queen and was cast by a member of his house. He seemed oddly unconcerned about whether the party would kill him or turn him over to the police at that point, or perhaps it was just a show of bravado-- Red and Jon both found the drow's facial expressions extremely hard to read. Asked about whether he was working with Chavalk, he scoffed "Work with demons? What do I look like, some kind of idiot Vel'sharren?" Aler chose not to reveal his identity, instead obliquely hinting that he might be a member of House De'Afin (Vanessa's house) or a surface elf in disguise. The party eventually decided to release Enzin, asking him to take a message to his House matriarch, Talisha, telling her that the alliance between Chavalk and the illithids threatened to bring an invasion of Malachi and that they wished to speak with her about it. Enzin asked from whom the message came, but Aler again declined to say anything; Adriel said it came from the Hunters, and Enzin left, leaving his gear behind. 5) Arriving at the gates of Ruastin, the party decided to split up and enter in two groups through two different gates. I think the idea was supposed to be that the group containing the tiger, deinonychus, and drow would distract all the attention, while the group with nondescript looking humans on horses would slip in anonymously. Ironically, the opposite happened, as the more distinctive-looking group asked a mundane question about a good inn to stay in and were waved through without fanfare, while the nondescript-looking group asked where the town morgue was on the pretext that a knight they knew had died and was currently in the morgue (!) 6) Reuniting inside the city, the group encountered an oracular troll who ripped out his intestines in the middle of the street and read a prophecy from his own entrails. Apparently this isn't a particularly unknown phenomenon. The party is beginning to understand why the presence of a deinonychus dinosaur isn't causing that much commotion in Ruastin. The prophecy warned “When thy defense holds, let not thy guard down,” he cries in a ringing voice. “For the invasion can only succeed in its third wave. Once has it been turned back already, once more will it be turned back, and the third time it will not be. This kingdom will not survive unless the fight is taken to its enemies. So… it is written!” 7) The party found the morgue, whose door was boarded up with a notice posted on it that it had been condemned for reasons of public health and safety, and directing people to the Temple of Alayan instead. Red reminded everyone that the priestess of Alayan, Beyond Jessery, may be associated with Chavalk and should not be trusted with information. Jon talked to a gravedigger in the cemetery and learned that the morgue had been shut down due to some plague that had started by or at least blamed upon Skenebrax the morguekeeper, killing two people and sickening several others.The morgue had no windows, but Bay and Aler were able to squeeze through a vent, and seeing no enemies, had Red open a hole in the back wall using stone shape. Exploring the morgue, the party got the impression it had been vacated-- the morgue shelves were all empty and only nonmagical anatomy books remaining on the bookcases. There was a trench in the floor with some white fluid, radiating cold, that shattered a vial when Zadkiel tried to collect it. Red's alchemy check suggested perhaps it is a magical preservation fluid. 8) Behind a secret door, the party found a staircase leading down to Skenebrax's slightly distrurbing living quarters. There was a fancy coffin lying next to the bed, a magical vat of slightly congealed blood, a bathtub with blood stains around the drain, and a magical refrigerator containing a human brain and a wine bottle. Most of the personal effects seem to have been removed from this room, but the party did find a few pertinant letters, including one from a friend of Skenebrax's girlfriend urging them to leave Ruastin before "things get worse" and another from a friend of Skenebrax's suggesting that his curse, which Skenebrax had already ruled out as Abyssal, might possibly be Chaotic in nature. "There is a prophecy that Xhriakw will return to the land led by a Lord of the Abyss who has mastered the three Hounds of Chaos. I have reason to believe Chavalk controls one of the Hounds of Chaos. If he is in league with Xhriakw, then perhaps Chaos could be the source of your curse. Although to be honest with you, I think it would be kind of strange for an elder force of chaos to concern himself with harassing a morgue operator with some minor plague."Jon remembered an adventure he had gone on several years ago in a Temple of Chaos and a book his party had recovered there about the Lords of Chaos, and thought a contact of his in the Temple of Lyra might know more about it. 9) Heading to the Temple of Lyra, the party passed the Church of Tallian and found a clanking steampunky machine declaiming against the Church of Tallian for cheating on their taxes, nailing proof to the Church door. The party looked at the documents, which appeared to include copies of pages from a Ducal tax ledger compared with a letter of official report to the Duke listing a different and much lower number. The difference is significant, more than 100,000 gold. After the party had determined that none of them were actual members of the Church of Tallian, they decided this wasn't their problem and moved on to the Temple of Lyra. 10) The party met Jon's ex-girlfriend Kalima, who passed the sniff test and was glad to see Jon again. Jon did not tell her about Piper, nor about his curse, but he did tell her about Seven's abduction and asked about the book of Chaos. Kalima was confused and said that Jon had been the one to take this book from the temple, to read through for his planar studies. Jon has no memory of this. Their adventure in the temple of Chaos was seven years ago. 11) The party decided to go to the Center of the Third Eye to try and get more information. On the way, they were ambushed by a spiky nightmarish monster, a burning smilodon skeleton, and a handful of invisible demon assassins. Zadkiel turned into an angel again, inspiring a bunch of nearby dwarves to rally against the skeletal cat. Red was dominated by the nightmarish monster into trying to kill Jon and Bay, but luckily got some really terrible rolls, meanwhile the rest of the party got some great ones and Adriel eventually dispatched the nightmare being with the casualties including only one dwarf. 12) While Jon and Zadkiel talked to the dwarves, Red and Aler noticed a tatty, one-winged dragonborn stealthily exiting the scene of the ambush. Aler sent Syla to track where he was going and followed stealthily at a distance. And there we broke for the day! Next session, the party has stated their intent to A) track this dragonborn, B) visit the Third Eye, and C) go to the police station. Though the party did not make any progress on locating Seven, note that the only person in town you asked about her was a priestess of the goddess of music, who none of you would particularly be expecting to have any knowledge about the League of Snakes or criminal elements in town anyway. Jarth speaks up on the way to the Third Eye. "The message Seven left at her house said "666," he says. "To me that suggests they took her through an Abyssal portal. She must have eventually ended up in Ruastin since those are the coordinates she gave Jon, but if she came here by way of an Abyssal portal, surely we could try to track that down somehow?" Onward!